Dental Records: Best Practices for Information Management and Retention
Learning Objectives

Upon completion of this course, the dental professional should be able to:

• Compare the differences between a paperless and a chartless practice.
• Identify the owner of the dental record.
• Contrast the difference between a subjective and objective statement.
• Describe basic focuses of the four HIPAA standards.
• Justify the importance of keeping original patient records.
• Illustrate and translate the use of office standardized and common treatment and charting abbreviations.
• Discuss the advantage of comprehensive documentation versus incomplete treatment entries.
• List the differences between vital, important, useful and non-essential documents.
• Outline necessary documents for a complete patient dental record.
• Describe how to correct an incorrect charting entry.
• Relate the difference between business and clinical dental records.
• Describe the cabinetry styles of paper records.
• Describe the importance of dental record storage and back up.
• Explain the retention of dental records.
• Employ the proper transfer of dental records between locations and dental offices.